In one sense you could say it simply achieved what it set out to do - to liberate people from any unchosen form of life. That's really at the heart of liberalism, the vision of a human being that isn't told what to be or who to be, what kind of job you should have, what your identity should be. This is the ideal, the human who can choose who they are. But the irony is that in order to make this real, we enter a condition in which we cease to really experience this freedom.

Political scientist Patrick J. Deneen examines the impending, inevitable collapse of liberalism - as the victim of its own revolutionary success in creating a society of hyper-individuated actors in a landscape without communal bonds - and calls for pursuing a 'unitary conception' of society and politics beyond the limits of ideology.

Our Story, So Far

Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.

The reason I can't have nice things is that I will waste all my time watching TV on one of those nice things. This was proven to me once again while I was house/cat-sitting for some friends. Through exertion of will-power, expected neither by me nor anyone else, I actually did accomplish a great many things besides consuming motion picture entertainment. I did it by mostly watching particular movies one at a time, movies that I had a reason to watch, more specific than merely to have colors and sounds dancing for me in the room. I was selective, for the most part. And I avoided binging any series. I almost binged one, but an accident of fate spared me.

Trying to find something worth watching, I remembered someone mentioning they enjoyed an aspect of "Big Little Lies," the HBO limited series about a half-dozen women living in luxury but having all kinds of problems. And there was a murder, but the police couldn't seem to get to the bottom of it. It was a seven-episode series. I watched what I thought were the first three episodes and found it well-acted and somewhat intriguing. These women, though they were living in Malibu or Santa Monica or Santa Barbara or the Palisades, had problems just like the rest of us, serious and sad problems, problems that drove wedges between them or created bonds of confidence. Friendships, even.

The third episode was a relief because we found out which little boy had been assaulting Laura Dern's little girl, and it thankfully it wasn't the little boy we liked, whose mother was really too poor to live in the school district but wanted her kid to have the same chance as these over-privileged but really beautiful and winning Stepford children. Also, the sick wife-beating thread came to a head. The wife left her spouse, a separation it seemed was going to be a difficult thing to accomplish, and I was looking forward to all the tactics she would have to employ to keep her needy, violent husband at bay.

At least, until very near the ending. Then I realized I had watched the seventh episode instead of the third. But to be honest, it hardly mattered, except that it saved me four hours. Of what? Character and plot development? Those actresses were so good, I didn't really need anymore character work, and whatever fleshing-out the plot could've received was clearly unnecessary. The writers could... read more

On This Day in Rotten History...

In 1962 – (55 years ago) – in Centralia, Pennsylvania, a fire set deliberately to clear trash out of an underground landfill ignited an ancient coal seam in a nearby abandoned mine. The coal fire gradually spread underneath the town and became a threat to public health and safety. It created dangerous sinkholes, spewed sulfur smoke and carbon monoxide from openings in the ground, and defied all attempts to put it out. By 1984 a mass exodus from the town began, and in 1992, all real estate properties were officially condemned. Centralia, Pennsylvania, once home to a thousand people, is now a ghost town. Nothing remains there but a few derelict buildings and a crumbling network of empty streets covered with graffiti by curious visitors. In some places the ground is still hot to the touch, and cracks in the earth belch poisonous smoke from an underground fire that, experts say, could continue burning for another two hundred years.

In 1971 – (46 years ago) – in the district of Pabna in East Pakistan, units of Pakistan army troops and paramilitaries massacred more than two hundred unarmed members of the local Hindu minority. The killings were a part of Operation Searchlight, a military campaign meant to suppress a Bengali nationalist movement in what was then East Pakistan. Ever since the partition of India after independence in 1947, the new and predominantly Muslim nation of Pakistan had consisted of two sections or “wings” more than a thousand miles apart, with the massive territory of India in between. The two parts of the country had their religious, cultural, and political differences, and as an independence movement grew in East Pakistan, the national government in the West launched a systematic campaign of genocide that led to all-out war, in which India joined on the side of the separatist East. After nine months of air strikes, mass murder, rape, and other atrocities, the war ended with East Pakistan proclaiming itself the newly independent nation of Bangladesh. Body counts vary, but most researchers believe that the war killed about half a million people, and created some thirty million refugees.

Krauthammer and Sickle

Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.

Fox News Channel chattering skull Charles Krauthammer is off the chain and skating on the slippery slope toward socialism.

Back when we were hunting and gathering in small tribes, we didn't have much, but what we had we shared. We never let anyone go hungry or homeless who was in the tribe. And you had to do something pretty severe to get kicked out. It wasn't until we had a large surplus that we began starving people. Now, it could be said that these people we've been starving since we developed the ability not to starve anyone aren't members of our tribe. However, ethically, we've come to the conclusion that all people are human beings and worthy of every chance to live. Of course there's a sizeable minority of racist, nationalist, and religious fanatics who think anyone not like them should die. But for the most part, humanity is leaning toward including all of humanity and even some other beings in the "in" group.

And yet somehow, we're starving people. We're allowing people to go without medical treatment for permanently damaging or even fatal ailments. We're shortchanging them on education. We're shortchanging them on opportunity.

Just to review: when we barely had enough, we shared. Now that we have way more than enough, we allow a few a-holes to hoard a ridiculous surplus that could save lives.

We are slaves. If that offends anyone because it trivializes actual slavery, I'm sorry, but I don't mean this metaphorically. In the future, should we be fortunate enough to have one, people will wonder how we could stand it, having the basic necessities of survival denied us, held hostage, only provided to us on condition of our servitude. Obviously there are other ways to look at our condition, but when a small handful of idiotically privileged people skate merrily about in solid gold ice rinks or sip heroin tea in which they've poached the last embryonic platypus while toxically polluting more land than all the farmers in the world could farm, land that could be filtering pollution and hosting herds of cool megafauna, while the vast majority of people are either forced to work at unfulfilling, monotonous, spirit-killing, or even dangerous jobs, or to beg, or to pick weeds out of the desert gravel in order not to starve – what do you call that? You call that freedom?

The Moral Bankruptcy of Nations

Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.

Adam Smith didn't invent capitalism. I know this, not because I've read The Wealth of Nations, but because I had PJ O'Rourke read it to me. And I fell asleep. A lot. Because PJ's voice, while very like the punctuated drone of a band saw suffering sporadic power outages in a thunderstorm, cloaked me in its jaggedness, like thunder in a thunderstorm, and soothed me just because I knew it was there, like a stern God, whether I was paying attention or not.

Scottish philosophers fall into two camps: those who shag sheep, and those who don't. Adam Smith was by all accounts a non-sheep-shagging Scotsman. It doesn't seem like he shagged anything or anybody. No judgment there. If I were a homosexual Scottish philosopher in the 18th Century I would probably keep it to myself, or even keep it from myself. I'm not saying Smith was gay, I'm saying if I were a gay 18th-century Scottish philosopher, I mean, if I were in his shoes – those shiny black slippers with the silver buckles and those saucy white knee-socks – I wouldn't confront my sexuality at all. I'd just hang out with my mother a lot.

Mr. Smith had a utopian project: to examine a world in which a great deal was cruel and wrong and describe it as a world in which everything was on course to be as it should. Smith did not invent capitalism, but rather described an ideal version of it. That's my take-away, and remember, I'm notorious for maliciously misunderstanding the work of those of superior mentality, which includes everyone of any consequence. This essay will be no exception. It's already too late for this essay to be an exception.

In the century before Smith wrote his magnum opus, Rene Descartes, a fancy-pants Frenchman who wore big shirt-collars that extended down to his tits, took on the project of doubting everything. I judge Descartes harshly on one point, and that is when he abdicated his doubt for an invented God. He didn't invent God, he just used an old one someone else had invented to bridge the gap between godless mystery and the fact that existence itself exists. He was so close to discovering the meaninglessness of existence, but just as he was about to dig it up, he put the shovel down and said, "Well, somebody made all this dirt I'm digging around in. Let's just leave it at that."